Stefan Soutschek

Shopfloor networking strategy: Schaeffler Group creates messaging infrastructure with Schaeffler Digital Solutions

The use case discussed revolves around connectivity on the shopfloor. At Schaeffler, a major German supplier to the automotive and mechanical engineering industries, this means over 10,000 machines in 70 plants worldwide. In total, there are many more – around 20,000 machines – but not all of them will enter the digital world. A job for Schaeffler Digital Solutions GmbH, the internal and technology supplier. The subsidiary is a software expert in the field of machine data acquisition and analysis as well as predictive maintenance. Its focus is on machine connectivity and condition and real-time process monitoring. In this podcast episode, it becomes clear that the heterogeneity of the plant landscape is the biggest challenge when it comes to networking machines. On the shopfloor, there are machines from a wide variety of manufacturers, of different ages and with diverse interface types. There are also machines that have no interfaces at all. OPC UA is already widely used, but the so-called brownfield has many stumbling blocks. Nor, according to Schaeffler, is it just a matter of networking the machines; it is also important to include the various perspectives of the shopfloor and to look at machines comprehensively in order to gain new data insights – Overall Equipment Effectiveness (OEE), the mapping of overall equipment effectiveness. The goal is not to create data garbage, but still to collect so much data that additional, relevant KPIs such as energy efficiencies can be derived for new use cases even without major conversions. With the help of Schaeffler Digital Solutions’ messaging infrastructure, which is used alongside the gateways, this data is made available worldwide. Every Schaeffler employee who has the need and, above all, the authorization to use certain data for a use case can use it quickly and easily. How the new infrastructure works in detail and how the brownfield is successfully networked – this is explained in detail in the podcast.